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"death in venice" and self and stuff
I read Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" yesterday. It's terrible; don't bother reading it.
But there was one interesting bit that struck me. The story's about a stiff, studious, German novelist (read: Mann's blatant self-insert), and the story's divided into five acts. The second act gives us an extended bio of the novelist's life—he was born in such-and-such town, he craved fame at a young age, he published his breakout hit in such-and-such year, his works focused mostly on blah-blah-blah, he was given such-and-such award for his most recent novel and lived in Munich. It's the sort of blurb you might see on the back of a book, describing the author.
The rest of the book involves him wandering around Venice, getting a bizarre obsessive crush on some preadolescent boy, and eventually dying of cholera due to not GTFOing out of Venice when he should have.
And it did strike me, during the very last few pages, where he's wasting away, that—okay, it is a really cute ironic thing that we're given the man's bio in part 2, and we're supposed to feel satisfied that we basically know who we're dealing with, only to spend the rest of the book being shown a man that you never could have guessed based on that bio.
I often look up the bio for authors after I finish a book, as I'm curious about "where the book came from"—but "Death in Venice" twists that around in the most blatant sort of way.
* * *
There was a somewhat popular tech blogger a few years back who posted a lot on tech culture and a bit of functional programming evangelism. The latter I found "eh", but the former I found genuinely interesting; he had a charismatic (if bombastic) writing style, and had some keen insights with regard to stuff like the perverse incentives of venture capitalist culture, arguments for unionization, and so on and so forth.
On message boards (crucially, not on his blog posts), the blogger would often rail about specific companies he'd worked for that were terrible, or specific terrible experiences he had in tech. And since I personally know people who have had awful experiences of such things, I shrugged and believed it to be mostly-true; people run into shit managers and shit luck all the time.
Then I went to work at one of the companies he bitched out.
I wasn't worried about working for the company; it was large enough that culture varies hugely from team to team anyway.
But, curious to see what he'd done while he was there, I searched his name internally and was surprised to discover that—well, he came across as an insane person.
The paper trail was very long and I don't think I missed anything important. Essentially, this guy had spent hours and hours spilling thousands and thousands of words on the internal version of Reddit (and, yes, having an internal version of Reddit is about as bad of an idea as you'd expect), shouting loudly about what THE COMPANY DIRECTION SHOULD BE!!! and those MORON VICE PRESIDENTS JUST WON'T LISTEN TO HIM!!! and he CLEARLY HAS DIRECTOR-LEVEL VISION!!! ...all this from a dude just barely out of college, who had joined the company two months prior.
Coworkers on internal-Reddit tried to be nice to him, and suggested that maybe he could wait a little longer than two months before trying to shake everything up? or maybe figure out a more productive forum for change than basically-internal-Reddit?
Dude did not take any of the coworkers' advice, and proceeded to spend many more months bolstering further claims of his own grandiosity, his overlooked technical brilliance, etc etc. Then he got his first little performance review thingy—and yes, I hate performance reviews more than anyone, but this dude fucking hit the roof over a performance review that rated him above-average!, i guess because it didn't rate him "supergenius" or something. Then he screamed about it on internal-Reddit for another many more thousands of words before ragequitting the company.
Um. Ummmm.
Honestly, his messages read untreated-bipolar-disorder or something similar, to me. I felt bad for him and hoped he got help (though his more recent posting doesn't really suggest this is the case).
Having this weird insider knowledge makes it a trip to go back and read his old blog posts. Like, yeah, he wants tech workers to unionize, and he has some nice arguments for it. But you can bet damn well who he thinks the union boss should be. You know damn well how he reacts to slights.
(A similar case of this is Shanely Kane, who writes really cogent and interesting lefty stuff for Model View Culture, but acts kind of unbelievably vicious on social media. Sorry, I am just super not onboard with the "unchecked fury is the answer to all slights" strain of lefty activism.)
* * *
That's the funny thing about meeting people online. I'm not talking OKCupid or whatever, I mean meeting people on online—in internet communities, in places where your socialization is first and foremost in a constructed realm, with no particular aim to ever meet up "IRL." People have more power to mediate what image they present of themselves.
Not that I want to say the internet's categorically different, in the scaremongery way old fuddy-duddies do. No one knew the protagonist in "Death in Venice," either, and that was way before the internet.
And neither am I saying that people present themselves falsely particularly often. I've met a handful of online friends in person, and they all were basically the person I expected. Usually there's an upfront shock of quirks that didn't translate through the keyboard—"oh wow, I was not expecting you to have this thick Valley Girl accent" or "you are way shorter and less imposing than I expected" or whatever, but nothing that changes who they fundamentally are, who I know them to be. (And recognizing that always brings a little thrill—here is my friend, come to life more brilliantly than I could ever have imagined!)
The internet's just one layer of possible indirection. But it's a particularly potent and prevalent layer, nowadays.
I sometimes wonder how I come across on Tumblr and Dreamwidth and whatnot. I know in many ways I'm more open here than IRL, but in some crucial ways I'm more closed off. I feel like I'm full of both more blistering bombast and abject despair on here, because I tend to be vent-ier here—what do people imagine me to be, based on that?
And sometimes I scroll through the Twitter or Tumblr feeds of writers or artists I admire, and imagine I know them. If they live in my city, I'll sometimes wish there were some non-awkward way to ask them to meet up for coffee, because of course we could be awesome friends, if we just had some way of meeting each other...! (Creepy, I know; I blame the 21st century.)
But of course I don't know them. Scrolling a feed is not knowing someone. The artsy side of me seems to like to think that my work says something deep about me, about the kind of person I am—but in practice, I think, if your work says anything about you at all, it's often buried so deep it's hard for anyone but you to see the important bits. It seems there has to be some mutuality, conversations where they learn about you as you learn about them.
And anyway, last time I asked someone for coffee solely because I'd admired their online work, they turned out to be a pompous asshole who forced a kiss on me in the back of some mediocre bar I've never returned to.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the posts where I'm basically describing "the human condition" and puttering out for lack of novel things to say on the topic, so let's just end it there :P
But there was one interesting bit that struck me. The story's about a stiff, studious, German novelist (read: Mann's blatant self-insert), and the story's divided into five acts. The second act gives us an extended bio of the novelist's life—he was born in such-and-such town, he craved fame at a young age, he published his breakout hit in such-and-such year, his works focused mostly on blah-blah-blah, he was given such-and-such award for his most recent novel and lived in Munich. It's the sort of blurb you might see on the back of a book, describing the author.
The rest of the book involves him wandering around Venice, getting a bizarre obsessive crush on some preadolescent boy, and eventually dying of cholera due to not GTFOing out of Venice when he should have.
And it did strike me, during the very last few pages, where he's wasting away, that—okay, it is a really cute ironic thing that we're given the man's bio in part 2, and we're supposed to feel satisfied that we basically know who we're dealing with, only to spend the rest of the book being shown a man that you never could have guessed based on that bio.
I often look up the bio for authors after I finish a book, as I'm curious about "where the book came from"—but "Death in Venice" twists that around in the most blatant sort of way.
There was a somewhat popular tech blogger a few years back who posted a lot on tech culture and a bit of functional programming evangelism. The latter I found "eh", but the former I found genuinely interesting; he had a charismatic (if bombastic) writing style, and had some keen insights with regard to stuff like the perverse incentives of venture capitalist culture, arguments for unionization, and so on and so forth.
On message boards (crucially, not on his blog posts), the blogger would often rail about specific companies he'd worked for that were terrible, or specific terrible experiences he had in tech. And since I personally know people who have had awful experiences of such things, I shrugged and believed it to be mostly-true; people run into shit managers and shit luck all the time.
Then I went to work at one of the companies he bitched out.
I wasn't worried about working for the company; it was large enough that culture varies hugely from team to team anyway.
But, curious to see what he'd done while he was there, I searched his name internally and was surprised to discover that—well, he came across as an insane person.
The paper trail was very long and I don't think I missed anything important. Essentially, this guy had spent hours and hours spilling thousands and thousands of words on the internal version of Reddit (and, yes, having an internal version of Reddit is about as bad of an idea as you'd expect), shouting loudly about what THE COMPANY DIRECTION SHOULD BE!!! and those MORON VICE PRESIDENTS JUST WON'T LISTEN TO HIM!!! and he CLEARLY HAS DIRECTOR-LEVEL VISION!!! ...all this from a dude just barely out of college, who had joined the company two months prior.
Coworkers on internal-Reddit tried to be nice to him, and suggested that maybe he could wait a little longer than two months before trying to shake everything up? or maybe figure out a more productive forum for change than basically-internal-Reddit?
Dude did not take any of the coworkers' advice, and proceeded to spend many more months bolstering further claims of his own grandiosity, his overlooked technical brilliance, etc etc. Then he got his first little performance review thingy—and yes, I hate performance reviews more than anyone, but this dude fucking hit the roof over a performance review that rated him above-average!, i guess because it didn't rate him "supergenius" or something. Then he screamed about it on internal-Reddit for another many more thousands of words before ragequitting the company.
Um. Ummmm.
Honestly, his messages read untreated-bipolar-disorder or something similar, to me. I felt bad for him and hoped he got help (though his more recent posting doesn't really suggest this is the case).
Having this weird insider knowledge makes it a trip to go back and read his old blog posts. Like, yeah, he wants tech workers to unionize, and he has some nice arguments for it. But you can bet damn well who he thinks the union boss should be. You know damn well how he reacts to slights.
(A similar case of this is Shanely Kane, who writes really cogent and interesting lefty stuff for Model View Culture, but acts kind of unbelievably vicious on social media. Sorry, I am just super not onboard with the "unchecked fury is the answer to all slights" strain of lefty activism.)
That's the funny thing about meeting people online. I'm not talking OKCupid or whatever, I mean meeting people on online—in internet communities, in places where your socialization is first and foremost in a constructed realm, with no particular aim to ever meet up "IRL." People have more power to mediate what image they present of themselves.
Not that I want to say the internet's categorically different, in the scaremongery way old fuddy-duddies do. No one knew the protagonist in "Death in Venice," either, and that was way before the internet.
And neither am I saying that people present themselves falsely particularly often. I've met a handful of online friends in person, and they all were basically the person I expected. Usually there's an upfront shock of quirks that didn't translate through the keyboard—"oh wow, I was not expecting you to have this thick Valley Girl accent" or "you are way shorter and less imposing than I expected" or whatever, but nothing that changes who they fundamentally are, who I know them to be. (And recognizing that always brings a little thrill—here is my friend, come to life more brilliantly than I could ever have imagined!)
The internet's just one layer of possible indirection. But it's a particularly potent and prevalent layer, nowadays.
I sometimes wonder how I come across on Tumblr and Dreamwidth and whatnot. I know in many ways I'm more open here than IRL, but in some crucial ways I'm more closed off. I feel like I'm full of both more blistering bombast and abject despair on here, because I tend to be vent-ier here—what do people imagine me to be, based on that?
And sometimes I scroll through the Twitter or Tumblr feeds of writers or artists I admire, and imagine I know them. If they live in my city, I'll sometimes wish there were some non-awkward way to ask them to meet up for coffee, because of course we could be awesome friends, if we just had some way of meeting each other...! (Creepy, I know; I blame the 21st century.)
But of course I don't know them. Scrolling a feed is not knowing someone. The artsy side of me seems to like to think that my work says something deep about me, about the kind of person I am—but in practice, I think, if your work says anything about you at all, it's often buried so deep it's hard for anyone but you to see the important bits. It seems there has to be some mutuality, conversations where they learn about you as you learn about them.
And anyway, last time I asked someone for coffee solely because I'd admired their online work, they turned out to be a pompous asshole who forced a kiss on me in the back of some mediocre bar I've never returned to.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the posts where I'm basically describing "the human condition" and puttering out for lack of novel things to say on the topic, so let's just end it there :P
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Anyway, the last bit put me in the mind of the time I dated a fan of my writing. (Which I knew to be a terrible idea, but I did not give any fucks about anything at the time.) There was this weird point where I realized that she was interpreting everything I was saying as if I were one of the characters I'd written. And the thing that made it more tricky was that it was about more or less correct 80% of the time, since I'd stuffed a lot of my own psychodrama into that character. But that last 20% made a world of difference, and she'd never bridge that gap because her idea of me as that character was so potent in her mind.
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(Tho of course you could've meant multiple people on that one lol)
Because of the Boston/NYC stint I always kind of mentally pictured you with what I think of as an East Coast vibe, with darker and curlier hair and maybe an edgier dressing style and then when I met you I thought "Hey I could've gone to high school with her!" (barring time displacement) which makes sense because you're from Kentucky and I went to high school in Tennessee.
People have more power to mediate what image they present of themselves.
Well, this was what was so liberating to weird kids like me who got online in the late 90s, especially on platforms where everything was text-based and icons and graphic style hadn't come into play yet and the only thing you had to present was a catchy username and the power of your own words. Suddenly being short and acne-prone and clumsy and unsure of how to take jokes just didn't matter and basically the key to success was impulse control and knowing when not to hit the send button... and then you could hang out with all these cool characters with names like Reverend Bleech and Pierce Inverarity and Jahweh and The Velvet Elvis, who presented as their own constructs. Seriously, it was like taking a magic pen and drawing a cartoon portal into another world and I don't know that people who've grown up in a post-Facebook world can experience it in quite that way.
I got a spouse and some lasting friends out of that scene (I married Pierce Inverarity), because we DID encourage meeting one another on my Usenet group. But the constructs were hella powerful and years later I still think of this guy who grew up and got married and has a kid and Facebooks with my husband as my old buddy Bleech.
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all these cool characters with names like Reverend Bleech and Pierce Inverarity and Jahweh and The Velvet Elvis
omg i think those are some of the most baller online handles i've ever seen.
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but I think I would enjoy having tea with you offline sometime.
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and yes offline tea sometime would be the best, i will point at birds & say their names & stuff~
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this was a fun post to discover in the likes, and you got lots of sympathetic nodding about finding the dude's unhinged papertrail. not that it's endemic to *just* the west coast but there's a particular strain of founder that sure has a bunch of emotional skeletons in the closet. like you, i do hope he finds peace at some point.
this kinda ironically dovetails with an observation that recently a lot of "big name" indie artists/webcomickers in the last five-seven years have gotten a reputation of being intimidating/hard to know/closed off... know a few personally and it's sadly a lot of being burnt by bad-faith interactions and semi-public fallouts. something feels like it's shifted in that there's a greater meta-awareness of how that presentation can be used (TT influencers).
going off on even more of a tangent, it feels like there's a greater distinction (tension between?) of creative work meant to fufill eyeballs versus private meaning. the work being shown in private discord groups being *vastly* different than posted-on-twitter work, and it's an interesting dissection of who they want to be seen as vs who they want the work to be seen as. or both? neither?
fun existential questions ~
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re: the bigname webcomicers: yeah, i feel like this is a tension in pretty much... all creative fields, and professional fields to a certain extent? off the top of my head:
* i have a engineer-colleague who's absolutely world-class in $niche_software_specialty. not many people need the thing in his niche, but if you do, and you hire him, he will simply Solve Your Problem.
he also happened to work with a VERY charismatic product-manager-type, early in his career, and they were good buddies, like, "vacation at product manager's summer home together" kinda tier, right.
product-manager-type is now, like, a big-company director/VP-level type of guy. and while product manager guy was advancing in his career, he was able to rising-tide-lifts-all-boats bring the engineer along. just kept hiring this guy to solve his problems.
but the engineer, right, he does not want to be a director or VP or manager type, he just wants to engineer shit mostly-independently. and a lot of these large companies aren't really structured to let a random VP unilaterally declare "i want to hire this guy specifically", like, that guy's so far removed from random engineers, it makes sense that the line managers or even people in between the line manager and the VP get a much bigger say in that sort of thing.
so engineer guy interview's at product guy's latest gig, but kind of halfheartedly, because he doesn't really want to switch jobs and he's far enough along in his career he finds the "code this shit on a whiteboard" shit kind of trivial/demeaning. which is fine, but he doesn't get the job, and now the product guy feels weird about it, and also product guy hangs around in weird VP-level social circles these days... i don't think they're not friends anymore but i just don't think there's a straightforward "here's the correct thing to do 100% of the time" way to navigate those tensions? and this is a best-case scenario where e.g. engineer didn't really want the job, likes his current job fine, so there's no hard feelings, but imagine if he had wanted the job and had bad feelings toward product guy for not spending a ton of political capital to insist he get hired anyway, etc... this stuff can get way trickier.
anyway i get the impression that's one way relationships in creative fields can get weird (if you happen to have a lot of popularity/success and your good buddy isn't, is everyone involved able to manage any potential resentments/jealousies/etc, not everyone can), and i think that sort of thing is easier to navigate if e.g. the "non-competitive just-for-fun shared common space" is, e.g., a fandom with like 20 people in it, because then sure you can have a mixture of Highly Skilled Professionals chatting as equals with Young Amateur Who Can Barely Hold A Pencil, because all 20 of you are in the same "damn we just want more Love For Our Blorbos" meeting around, but if there's tens of thousands of people, and the "big name fans" are getting inundated with DMs from randos and simply don't have time to have that many friends even if they wanted to (and that's even ignoring the whole potential of "some of these people are intrusive/weird/aggro/etc"), like... i can see why the "big name fan" in this case would try to hold the door open to some extent, because they probably like having that "amateur playground" place too, and don't want to feel like they have to shut out all potential of "organically meeting a cool person you vibe with over a shared hobby"... but if those numbers just get Higher Than A Normal Person Can Deal With then yeah they're gonna close things off more.
THIS IS PROBABLY ALL STUFF YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH SORRY I SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED NEAR LARGE TEXTBOXES lol
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(shoot even if i had heard the thing a thousand times before, i always love your take on it- you have a way of looking sideways at a thing like the chickadee i saw on the fence today and it's neat ~)
the specific examples OY VEY..... let out a literal audible groan of sympathy when i saw where it was headed yeahhh.
in some ways i think you're right with the low stakes fandom 'love of the blorbo' vibe but then it gets super vicious in the whole ... webcomics just-talented-to-have-a-series -> lucky/skilled enough to get popular and picked up by actual agents -> enough biz skills to be a mini publisher/anthology circle -> all the way up. the money's so slim (slim enough that free therapy and steady medication would honestly help a lot) and it's such a competative pie with people who Care Oh So Much and ohhhh lua the stories i could tell you about fallouts with romantic exes (who are now publishers) and creative partners of ten plus years turned stalkers.... it gets spicy let alone the personas that people are aiming *for*.
which are also different than what they might already be known/want, lol. but we could spend hours talking about this XD
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?!?!?!????? oh my GOD ahlgiehlag sounds WRETCHED... one of those moments where i'm glad my life is so comparatively boring haha...,,,,